Flemish DJ and filmmaker Pascal Garnier remembers vividly the circumstances in which he first watched the Dutch-made 1986 music documentary Big Fun In The Big Town. Directed by Bram van Splunteren and presented by Marcel Vanthilt, this was one of the first films to chronicle the New York hiphop scene, and featured artists like Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J and Run-DMC.
“I saw it when I was 15 on television. A few years later, I managed to get a VHS copy,” Garnier says of a documentary which he still regards with near religious devotion. As a teenager looking for his own “thing and identity,” he was strongly influenced by the film’s “direct and intimate view of what it was like in New York back then.”
Garnier was a white Belgian adolescent listening to black New York music. “It was the concept of making music with very little means. Not having to be able to sing but just [performing] poetry on a rhythm – that basic idea that you don’t even need music [but] where you can tap out the music on a wall or a table – that was very accessible,” Garnier recalls the attraction of the hiphop world. “It was so new, so different…I was looking for something different from my parents. I didn’t want to listen to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.”
The young Flemish teenager wasn’t the only devotee. “Most of the people I know from Belgium and Flanders who ended up making music, they saw the movie at one point or another. They all cherish that same movie.”
This was an era long before iTunes and Spotify. If you wanted the latest “grooves,” you had to queue up at your local record shop.
When Public Enemy toured Europe in the late 1980s, the band members asked at gigs to be introduced to the audience by the director of the documentary. “They felt like he had the right chops and the credibility to introduce them properly.”
Since then, Garnier has become an influential musical force himself, a producer and DJ who goes under the moniker, Krewcial.
Now, he is making his own film, A Hiphop Minute, which has been one of the works-in-progress feature projects presented at international showcase CONNEXT this month.
And, yes, 36 years later, the director still draws inspiration from Big Fun In The Big Town. “Of course, I am obviously watching it now because we are using parts of it in our movie but I have watched it so many times…I think it is still as fresh [as ever]. I notice that [buzz] when I show it to either people or see other people watching it.”
The director recently showed the film to his teenage son (who is now roughly the same age he was when he first saw it). His son was suitably impressed. “He wanted to see it because he knew I was working on A Hiphop Minute. It is always nice to see the impact it has on someone who has never seen it…even though for him, of course, it’s not looking into the future. It is looking into the past. Everything in the movie, he has seen it because it is all over now – the way people look, the way people talk, the music, the rapping. For us, it was unfamiliar, almost revolutionary and brand new.”
New York has changed in the intervening years. Many of the artists featured are now in their 50s or even older.
“What I didn’t want to do was to make a history of hiphop,” Garnier talks of his desire to give his documentary some of the same edge as the original and not to allow it to become blunted by nostalgia. “I was more interested in their [the musicians’] personal stories. It’s much more about the human side of things. Next to being a superstar, they are also husbands and fathers – and they’ve been through a lot of stuff.”
Garnier travelled to New York to meet some of the key protagonists. They’re very big
names and don’t give many interviews to European journalists and filmmakers. However, he had his own way of reaching them.
“I kept pushing and pushing…it took a lot of time,” the director says. It helped that he had a connection with Bill Adler, a supremely well connected music exec, curator and journalist who had been a publicist at record label Def Jam in the 1980s. Adler features in A Hiphop Minute as one of the key interviewees. He is friends with many of the big names in hiphop – and knows their managers too. “Once you get into that inner circle and get connected to Bill, it becomes a lot easier.” Through Adler, he was able to interview LL Cool J at his grandmother’s house. Once the other musicians knew Garnier had spoken to LL Cool J, they were also more ready to speak.
The documentary is being made through Ghent-based production outfit Animal Tank run by Brecht Van Elslande. “It has been a long and bumpy road,” the director says of a project on which he has now been working in one way or another for almost a decade. He partnered at first with a different production company but the producers there got cold feet about the potential cost of the music rights. Another partner couldn’t come up with the money. Garnier was therefore very relieved to hook up with Van Elslande.
A Hiphop Minute is now close to completion. “I grew up in the cinema era and so for me of course, a movie is always nicer to see in a nice venue with a big screen and a good sound system,” the director explains why he is holding out for a theatrical release.
Next year marks hiphop’s 50th birthday and so marks a perfect time to launch the new movie, Garnier adds.
